By CED KURTZ, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Apps for your phone. Apps for your tablet. Apps for your browser. Apps for your computer. When did we go so app happy?

Faster data networks being rolled out by cell-phone carriers will enable new services on phones and other wireless devices, including flawless streaming video, teleconferencing and real-time Internet applications.

Under new legislation being devised by the Obama administration, the government would be able to listen in on all your Internet communications -- Twitter, Facebook, Skype and others.

Recently, the publisher of the 126-year-old, 20-volume, 750-pound, $1,165 Oxford English Dictionary said he thought it was increasingly unlikely that another edition would appear on paper.

How big is the Internet? It seems like a simple question until you try to answer it.

One of the problems is that the Internet is a distributed system and not a centralized one. Think of mail delivery in your neighborhood. That is a centralized system. Each piece of mail goes to or comes from the post office.

TechMan was rooting around in the basement the other day and came across a hippie era stash of -- no, not that -- Whole Earth Catalogs and magazines.

Anyone coming of age in the '60s, '70s or '80s remembers those publications, favorites of the back-to-the-earth, counterculture movement.

The Federal Communications Commission has now unveiled its National Broadband Plan, a road map to the future of broadband Internet service in the United States.

A main goal of the plan is to give U.S. consumers faster, cheaper Internet service everywhere in the country on many devices.

When they hear "wiki," most people think of Wikipedia, that omniscient compendium of knowledge and sometimes misinformation. But Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) is only the best known of a multitude of wikis on all subjects.

Among the computer attacks that have grown in popularity recently is the banking Trojan.

Bad guys have been trying to crack into banking systems for a long time and because of that, banks have increased the security around their servers to the point that it is pretty hard to crack them.

After lots of hype and repeated saccharin-sweet TV commercials, Microsoft's new operating system, Windows 7, finally arrives this week.

The release on Thursday raises the question, "Should I buy Windows 7?" In order to help readers make that decision, here is a guide:

Q: Is Windows 7 a giant step away from Windows Vista?